Where to Start with Philip Roth: A Reading Guide
Where to start with Philip Roth — whether to begin with American Pastoral, Portnoy's Complaint, or The Human Stain. A complete reading guide to Roth's novels.
Philip Roth (1933–2018) is the most significant American novelist of his generation after Saul Bellow — a writer whose career spanned sixty years and whose major work, particularly the American Trilogy (American Pastoral, I Married a Communist, The Human Stain), constitutes the most sustained fictional engagement with American identity, American history, and American self-deception in contemporary literature. He won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the Man Booker International Prize, among many others.
Where to Start
The Best Entry Point: American Pastoral (1997)
The best first Roth — his Pulitzer Prize winner and the novel that most fully demonstrates his mature gifts. The Swede’s golden life — his athletics, his beauty, his Newark glove factory, his wife, his house in Old Rimrock — is shattered by his daughter Merry’s involvement in anti-Vietnam terrorism, and the novel traces his attempt to understand how this happened in the only terms available to him. Nathan Zuckerman’s narration adds a further layer of unreliability: we are watching a man watch another man’s life fall apart, and neither fully understands what he sees. Roth’s most humanly generous novel and his most American.
The Comic Early Work: Portnoy’s Complaint (1969)
Roth’s breakthrough novel — a comic monologue of devastating energy and frankness. Alexander Portnoy’s psychoanalytic confession ranges from his childhood in Newark (dominated by his hypochondriac, guilt-dispensing mother), through his adolescent sexuality, to his adult life as a civil rights advocate unable to reconcile his private appetites with his public idealism. The novel is simultaneously a satirical account of Jewish-American middle-class anxiety, a comedy about male sexuality, and a genuinely psychologically serious portrait of a man divided against himself. Explicit and very funny; the best starting point for readers who want Roth at his most accessible.
The Trilogy’s Third Part: The Human Stain (2000)
The final volume of the American Trilogy and, for many readers, the best of the three. Coleman Silk, a classics professor at Athena College, is forced to resign after being accused of racist language — an accusation whose particular irony is that Silk has spent his entire life passing as Jewish, concealing his Black heritage. The novel is Roth’s most complex engagement with American identity politics and his most compassionate portrait of a man who has constructed an identity through a lifetime of sustained effort, only to have it destroyed by a historical moment that cannot see what it is doing. The thriller plot (Silk’s violent ex-lover) is the least interesting element; the identity questions are the novel’s heart.
The Plot Against America (2004)
Roth’s alternate history — and his most accessible novel for readers coming from outside literary fiction. In 1940, the aviator Charles Lindbergh defeats Franklin Roosevelt for the presidency on an isolationist platform; the United States makes a pact with Nazi Germany; and the Roth family of Newark (thinly fictionalised autobiography) watches American anti-Semitism become official policy. The novel works as a straightforward historical thriller and as an account of what it felt like to be a Jewish child in America when the social contract began to fail.
Sabbath’s Theater (1995)
Roth’s most extreme novel — a comic-elegiac account of Mickey Sabbath, a sixty-four-year-old puppeteer of radical sexual licence, grieving for his dead mistress and contemplating his own death. Roth’s Pulitzer Prize winner was actually American Pastoral, but many critics consider Sabbath’s Theater the greater achievement: funnier, more anarchic, and more honest about the relationship between sexuality, mortality, and art. Very explicit and very funny; best approached after the American Trilogy, when Roth’s range is already established.
Reading Philip Roth
Roth’s fiction divides readers sharply, largely along the question of his treatment of women. His female characters have been criticised as insufficiently realised compared to his male protagonists; his defenders argue that his fiction is specifically about male self-delusion, and that the women’s flatness is an accurate consequence of being seen through men who do not fully see them. Both positions have merit, and the best approach is to read him as a novelist of male American consciousness — one of the finest in the language — while remaining alert to what his perspective excludes.
Frequently Asked Questions
Where should I start with Philip Roth?
American Pastoral (1997) is the best starting point for most readers — the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel in which the Swede, a golden Newark athlete and model American, watches his daughter become a terrorist during the Vietnam War, and with her, everything he believed about America and about himself. It is Roth's most accessible major novel, his most fully realised account of American middle-class life and its discontents, and the work that established his late-career reputation. Portnoy's Complaint is the best starting point for readers who want Roth's early, more explicitly comic mode.
What is American Pastoral about?
American Pastoral (1997) is narrated by Nathan Zuckerman, who reconstructs the story of Seymour 'the Swede' Levov — a legendary Newark athlete who marries a Miss New Jersey and builds a life of exceptional normality — and whose daughter Merry becomes a radical bomber during the Vietnam era, destroying everything the Swede believed about himself and about the promise of American life. The novel is Roth's meditation on the American Dream: the possibility that a person can build a life of goodness and decency and have it destroyed anyway, not by his own failures but by history's indifference.
Is Portnoy's Complaint appropriate to start with?
Portnoy's Complaint (1969) is Roth's most famous early novel — a comic monologue in which Alexander Portnoy delivers a long psychoanalytic confession to his therapist, covering his Jewish mother, his sexual obsessions, his political idealism, and his rage at the gap between who he is and who he wants to be. It is very funny, very explicit, and very specific to its moment (the sexual revolution, the Jewish-American experience of the 1950s and 1960s). It is an excellent starting point for readers who want Roth's early style and who are comfortable with explicit sexual comedy; it is not representative of his mature, more serious work.
What is the American Trilogy?
Philip Roth's American Trilogy — American Pastoral (1997), I Married a Communist (1998), and The Human Stain (2000) — is his most sustained engagement with American history and American idealism. Each novel is narrated by Nathan Zuckerman and deals with a different historical moment: American Pastoral with the 1960s and Vietnam, I Married a Communist with McCarthyism and the 1950s, The Human Stain with Clintonism and political correctness in the 1990s. Each follows a man whose life is destroyed by the historical forces of his time. Read in order if possible; American Pastoral works well independently as the entry point.
